The best picture of him in his adolescent years is given in the correspondence with Theodor Apel, the friend of 1832-1836. There we have in epitome the whole Wagner of the later years, with his imprudence in all the practical affairs of life, the irrepressible vitality that enabled him to recover so quickly after each of the many crises he went through,[46] his extravagance, his incurable tendency to run up debts with tradesmen and to borrow money from his friends, his Micawberish confidence in the speedy turning of his luck. It is evident that at an early stage of their friendship he had drawn upon the purse of Apel, who had the dangerous gift—for a friend of Wagner\'s—of riches. But the young Micawber has no doubts as to the future. In October 1834 he is quite convinced that he is going to have a great success with Die Feen, which will lead to a still greater success for Das Liebesverbot; he will make a lot of money, and he and Apel will go and enjoy themselves in Italy for a year or two. This desirable consummation is to come about in the spring of 1836. In Italy he will write some Italian operas, and then they will go to France, where he will write a French opera; and so on. [47] We have some indication of the depth of the draughts he was then taking of the physical joy of life in a letter of 6th June 1835, in which he tells Apel to "enjoy and be merry." "I have now resolved," he says, "to be a complete Epicurean with regard to my art: nothing for posterity, but everything for the present and the moment."[48]
mother
WAGNER\'S MOTHER.

But soon there comes an emotional crisis of the kind that occurred so frequently in Wagner\'s life. The tearful, almost hysterical, letter to Apel of 21st August 1835 is a remarkable document. Wagner seems to have got heavily into debt, to have done all sorts of foolish things, and to have vexed and saddened his friends and relations. Even Apel appears to have been for a while estranged from him. Wagner beats his breast in agony. He has been mad; the promised happiness of youth has fled from him; but he will make a brighter future for himself. Note already, in this letter, the passion for self-revelation and self-dramatisation that is evident in so much of his later correspondence. He was not a dramatist, said Nietzsche once: he merely loved the word drama. He certainly loved the words repentance and morality.

"I have sinned. Yet not so! Does a man sin when he is mad? I have fallen out with my family, and must regard our relations as at an end.... Till now I have managed my life very badly. Dearest, I was not wicked, I was mad; that is the only expression I can find for my conduct—it was a conventional madness (ein konventioneller Wahnsinn). I see now only too well that money is not a chimera, not a despicable, worthless thing of no importance; I have formed the conviction that money is as much alive as the society in which we are placed. I was mad, I say, for I did not understand myself and my relation to the world. I knew that I had no surely-founded foothold and support at all, and yet I acted like one insane, went beyond my circumstances in every respect, and with the ignorance and inexperience of a man who has never any solid title to money; no one, not even a rich man, throws away money as I did. The result was a whirlpool of perplexity and misery, the entanglements of which I cannot contemplate without dismay. I cannot reckon up the details; it is unheard of and inexplicable into what an abyss I have fallen. Your enormous and incessant efforts to rescue me from it only made me more daring, and made me put my trust in a blind something of which, indeed, I could give no clear account to myself, but that blinded my eyes more and more completely. My life in Leipzig, the pitiable position I had there, were intolerable burdens; I was driven into so-called independent displays of strength; I broke out into extravagances which, combined with the still lasting consequences of my earlier follies, completely estranged my family from me, and at last brought about a rupture with all my surroundings." He is sure, however, that he has now learned wisdom. Then comes a passage of a type that we often meet with in his letters. "I cannot, however, go back to Magdeburg[49] until I have got rid of the burden of a debt of 400 thalers. So I stand—I am forsaken by, and separated from, everyone, everyone on whom I might otherwise reckon, and accompanied only by the painful anxiety of my mother. She can give me nothing. You are the only one left to whom I can appeal"; and so on, and so on, in the customary professional borrower\'s style.

A few months later there is a similar wail. He has recovered his elasticity of spirit; he is working incredibly hard not only at his conducting but at the composition of his new opera. "I am now at the focal point of my talent; I do everything easily, and am pleased with it," he writes to Apel on 27th December 1835. In another three weeks the repentant sinner who had been so eloquent about having learned wisdom is once more distracted at the thought of his debts. "I must have money," he tells Apel, "if I am not to go mad."